Dear Republicans: Donald J. Trump is YOUR Inconvenient Truth

I don’t make predictions, and I damn sure don’t make them about anything regarding politics. Dewey did not defeat Truman. Gore won the most votes and lost the election. People actually at one time thought Sarah Palin was smart enough to be the Governor of Alaska. Weird and crazy shit doesn’t happen infrequently in this country, it happens all the damn time.

So yeah, I guess it’s totally possible Donald Trump could be the Republican Party’s nominee, despite all reason and logic pointing otherwise.

What’s cool though, is that whether or not that happens, he’s forcing the GOP to reconcile with the truth about what they have become. Trump is a mirror that is being thrust in front of them. Like any good carnival mirror, he’s doing one hell of a job distorting the image, leaving them seeing a slightly different reflection from one another.

Some think he’s a charlatan. It’s totally possible. I’ve definitely caught a whiff of troll off the orange monstrosity a couple of times myself. Others think he’s the embodiment of exactly the kind of politician they’ve craved in the last two elections — brash and apologetic about his hubris or ability to spout complete and utter bullshit. Many are trying their hardest to paint him as someone who does not represent the Republican Party.

Carnival Mirror Trump is all of those things, which is why he is the inconvenient truth about themselves that none of them are willing to examine. The Donald made it all the more delicious for outsiders and painful for those on the inside during the last debate when he just went offabout the truth that we all now know about 9/11 and the Iraq War. Or at least, as close to the truth as can ever be hoped for out of his lips.

And that scared the holy living shit out of the establishment.

It’s going to be really interesting, though, to see if the voters even blink. He’s ripped the band-aid off the lies of what was really behind the Iraq War, but all these years later, the truth has become so self-evident that I wonder how many dyed-in-the-wool Republicans even deny it anymore. If he sees another spike in the polls, or wins another primary, things get incredibly more real and there will most certainly be a contested convention for the GOP this summer.

Exposing the lies of the Iraq War is one truth that establishment Republicans are queasy about, but the fact that he is the living embodiment of the Islamaphobia and xenophobia that is rampant in the party now I’m sure makes them downright ulcerous.

I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s so dangerous to them. He makes liberals’ cases against Republicans for them. No one but a Republican in this day and age would suggest barring Muslims from our country. Can you imagine a Democratic candidate coming down an escalator and then giving a rambling speech where they literally call the majority of Mexican immigrants in this country rapists, murderers and drug pushers? Que mierde esta, Trumpo?

Of course the establishment tried to distance themselves from those sentiments initially, but when his numbers started going up and down afterward, they were forced to at the very least not openly mock or trash his views, and they had to act tougher on immigration than maybe they’d like to in an election year.

For years now, I’ve been a clown observing the molten meltdown of the Republican Party. The central theme, to me, has always felt like “self-denial.” If they don’t embrace that he is a symbol for everything they are now, Trump may win the presidency but be the last Republican to do so. They have to accept it to change it.

I still hold out hope that the thought of Trump selecting Supreme Court Justices and/or representing our country in any capacity other than “the guy who cleans up garbage after the Olympics” will bring out regular people in droves to do the honorable, “Anything But a Republican” thing. But as always, I remember what I said at the top: Crazy shit happens in this country on the regular.